No Baracker’s fee
Rent a ‘bargain’ in ex-prez’s UWS bldg.
Renters at onone Upper West Side building aren’t paying executive prices just because a once-leader of the free world used to hang his A broker is boasting about the “below market” rent for a pad in the 142 W. 109th St. building that Barack Obama once called home. The $2,400permonth rent at Obama’s old home is the same as it was five years ago — and it’s also the same amount now advertised for a similar apartment in the fivestory, 13-unit prewar building, records show.
“Live in Obama’s old apartment building!!” Manhattan broker Alpha Properties says in the listing for apartment 2E, a two-bedroom unit just like the one the former president once occupied.
The “very large 2 bedroom apt, both rooms can fit Queen size beds. 2 blocks away from all major transportation — 1, 2, 3, C, cross town buses!!!” the ad screams.
Apartment 3E, where Obama lived when he was a student in the early 1980s at Columbia University, was rented to a new tenant in July.
Present-day tenants of the building, between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues, pay a lot more than the $360 per month Obama split with a roommate in 1981.
By 2010, Obama’s old pad rented for $1,900, more than five times the 1981 rent.
The apartment has been listed for $2,400 a month since July 2012.
Although there’s no premium to live in Obama’s old pad, renters reportedly get a framed picture of Obama standing in the apartment.
Like other New Yorkers, Obama got to know the problems of renting in the Big Apple.
He wrote in a memoir that he left the Upper West Side pad “due to lack of heat.”